Human trafficking is a human rights violation that is no respecter of persons. It occurs in every county, rural and urban, among all demographics, and within a multitude of industries. That said, those with the greatest risk factors for experiencing human trafficking are those made vulnerable by marginalization. Commitment to the empowerment model allows us to undo the harm of trafficking and control in the ways we help survivors explore choices and find their voice. Understanding power and control, how manipulation and abuse occurs in relationships and systems, and familiarity with personal, community, cultural, and structural barriers to reporting, recovery, and prosecution builds holistic community responses to human trafficking.
For agencies, advocates, and preventionists who have been engaged in the movement against sexual violence for decades, this knowledge base and its accompanying set of skills are the foundation of our work.
What is Human Trafficking?
Human trafficking happens when a person exploits another for labor and services. This exploitation occurs among various kinds of economic activity: domestic service, agriculture, construction, landscaping, food and hospitality services, tourism, door to door sales, factory work, and the fishing industry. It also occurs in underground economies such as drug and weapon sales, traveling sales crews, begging rings, and in the commercial sex industry. The primary focus on human trafficking is financial gain-or in the case of minors trading sex for daily needs--survival.
The Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000 defines human trafficking as:
- Sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18 years of age; or
- The recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery. (22 U.S.C. § 7102(9)).
The model below illustrates human trafficking in terms of Action, Means, and Purpose:
Some points to consider:
- A commercial sex act is any sex act in which something of value is given or exchanged.
- Smuggling is not the same as trafficking. Smuggling is a consensual transaction made for the purpose of bringing someone over the border, but also creates a high risk situation for the person being smuggled that can lead to being trafficking. A trafficker will control and coerce labor through debt bondage and threats to expose an immigration status.
- Movement or transportation does not need to occur to meet the definition of trafficking
- We must take care to distinguish between sex work that is coerced/non-consensual (sex trafficking) and sex work that is not. The impact of conflating the two causes harm to people who experience both (It Has to be Their Choice, Hanni Stoklosa and Chris Croft, Journal of Health Services Research and Policy, forthcoming). While we recognize there are strong feelings that sex work is exploitative and that views on efforts to decriminalize prostitution exist on a spectrum, advocacy that is trauma-informed and empowered supports a person’s right to define and describe their own experience.
- Force, fraud, and coercion are not required for the definition of sex trafficking for anyone under 18, but are required for the legal definition of labor trafficking with minors. Coerced drug sales is an example of labor trafficking among minors.
- Any commercial sex exchange by a minor is considered sex trafficking, even if there is not a third-party exploiter/trafficker. This definition applies for a minor being violently exploited by an organized, professional trafficker; for a minor being exploited by an abusive “romantic interest,” caregiver, or family member; for a homeless minor who is shown by another homeless minor how they’ve been surviving; and for a minor who self-initiates commercial sex exchange.
- Any exchange of sex for anything of value by a minor falls under the legal definition (and protections) of human trafficking even if the minor defines their own experience differently. By law minors cannot consent to commercial sex.
The Intersection of Human Trafficking with Sexual Violence
While not all human trafficking involves sexual violence, the history of forced labor has always included rape and sexual abuse as methods of harm, fear, and control, and the modern expression of trafficking is no different.
Any trafficking of a human for sex is sexual violence; many instances of trafficking of humans for non-sexual labor also include sexual violence as part of the force and control. Many people who are trafficked for commercial sex are also forced to do other forms of labor. While not all forms of human trafficking involve sexual violence, human trafficking is, broadly, a sexual violence issue. People being trafficked in any form are at significantly higher risk for sexual violence, and frequently have fewer options for recourse, safety, and recovery.
As sexual violence agencies, preventionists, and advocates, we can no longer afford to believe that human trafficking is not our issue. Survivors are depending on our insights, perspectives, experience, and wisdom.
The Landscape of North Carolina's Anti-Human Trafficking Movement
Unlike the sexual violence movement, the response in the last decade to human trafficking has not been survivor led, but the result of concerned community members stepping up to raise awareness, lobby for funding, and create advocacy organizations and regional coalitions. . And although victims/survivors of human trafficking have always been served within the sexual violence field, human trafficking advocacy as we currently know it “began” when the human trafficking label was attached to it.
NCCASA has been a leader in this movement from the beginning. In 2004 NCCASA with the NC Attorney General’s office convened an interdisciplinary meeting to address the problem of human trafficking. As a result, RIPPLE (Recognition, Identification, Protection, Prosecution, Liberation, Empowerment) was formed. An outcome of this meeting was North Carolina being recognized as 1 of 42 National Specialized Task Forces in the United States. NCCASA was funded to support victim response efforts through RIPPLE, which eventually became the NC Coalition Against Human Trafficking (NCCAHT), with NCCASA incubating it to this day as it continues to build capacity. NCCASA Executive Director served on the NC Human Trafficking Commission, and our Associate Director was Board Chair and now treasurer of NCCAHT, and also served on Project NOREST, a project led by UNC Chapel Hill School of Social Work to address trafficking of youth in the foster care system.
The Anti-Human Trafficking (AHT) movement in North Carolina has received much attention and funding, with that funding being directed towards organizations to provide critical services to survivors, and to collaborate with other stakeholders to create a multi-disciplinary response in their local communities. And while there is much to celebrate, we must emphasize the fact that a movement neither initiated nor led by survivors will have significant gaps in identifying survivors’ most important needs. Looking beyond emergency shelters that do not always provide housing for all survivors, what else contributes to a survivor’s well-being? Access to employment, a driver’s license, reliable transportation, childcare, recovery services, peer support, and court advocacy are critical needs.
Popular intervention strategies that heavily depend on criminal justice response leads to arrests, deportation and further marginalization. Survivors need support and advocacy to address the sexual abuse endured as children. Survivors need to make their own choices--which includes denying services without threats or judgment. They needed to feel safe and empowered.
As this movement has grown, two basic responses to human trafficking have emerged. One that sees the problem as isolated events that relies on on extraction, where the victims are physically removed from their location through arrest or rapid relocation, to achieve immediate separation from the trafficker and the area trafficked, despite extenuating circumstances such as having children, family, court dates, or emotional connections in the area where they were trafficked. According to this Rescue/Extraction model, safety is often defined by those helping and can sometimes compound the trauma and barriers to services that survivors already experience.
The other response engages the problem of human trafficking in terms of public health which looks beyond individual risk factors and single incidences, and considers risk factors in the community, and culture. The public health approach sees racism, xenophobia, and transphobia as means of primary prevention that is essential for a holistic response to human trafficking. It looks upstream to the factors that contribute to someone being trafficked and doing the trafficking. Because this response considers the complexity of contributing factors, advocates understand the values empowerment and self-determination over quick fixes and paternalistic assistance.
How We Work with Direct Service Providers to Assist Survivors
NCCASA does work from an intersectional, social justice perspective. We center our work on the most marginalized, because when we do ALL are served. We bring this perspective in all our training, technical assistance, and collaboration with state and national partnerships. We recognize the impact of historical oppression on human trafficking--how it shows up in who is trafficked, equity in who can access services, and barriers to healing and well-being.
Our training and technical assistance reflects the needs that rape crisis programs and members are sharing with us--what survivors need, and what programs need to best serve them. As rape crisis centers are increasingly called on to assist survivors of human trafficking, NCCASA’s anti-human trafficking work continues to focus on building capacity to better serve survivors.
If you are member agency of NCCASA, training and technical assistance around how to best serve survivors of human trafficking is included in your membership. And if you are not yet a member, you can find out more information about joining here. NCCASA has been engaged in the movement against human trafficking for over a decade; we encourage you to join us in that movement.
NCCASA is proud to serve on the Teach2Reach Curriculum Project Team
The Teach2Reach Project aims to enhance the well-being of middle and high school students across North Carolina by developing evidence-informed and developmentally appropriate content and protocols to teach students about sex trafficking and connect at-risk students with needed services.
Resources
| Title | Summary | Tags | Link |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 Biennial Conference: Community Collaboration is a Non-Zero Sum Game | In this session, the founders of Engage Together will provide the information, ideas, and inspiration community stakeholders need to understand how each of them is uniquely positioned to help end and prevent human trafficking, and how together, every need in communities can be met. This session is specifically designed for … | collaboration, community, community collaboration, human trafficking, multidisciplinary, stakeholders | |
| 2021 Biennial Conference: Creating Trauma Informed Digital Spaces: Text and Chat Features for Working with Sexual Assault & Human Trafficking Survivors | Phone hotline support, provided 24 hours a day, seven days a week, is a cornerstone of services for intimate partner (IPV) and sexual assault (SA) survivors. Increasingly, agencies have adapted chat and text (SMS) technology for emergency or crisis support of survivors of interpersonal violence. Chat and text are popular … | advocacy in digital spaces, digital services, digital space, digital spaces, hotline, human trafficking, phone hotline, SMS, text and chat | |
| An Advocate’s Response to the #SaveTheChildren Movement | Learning about the prevalence of child trafficking can turn the world of empathetic people upside down, who naturally want to “do something” in response. In this case, the emotionally fervent outcry has drawn many to publish misleading and incomplete information about the sex trafficking of minors. It has also attracted … | blog, blog post, DMST, domestic minor sex trafficking\, ht, human trafficking, sex trafficking, trafficking | |
| Are You On TRACC? | For your human trafficking awareness, are you on track? Check out questions you should ask yourself during this process. | ht, human trafficking, tool | |
| Building Sustainable Community Through Collaboration | Human trafficking is a crime that often involves other related forms of violence — sexual violence, child maltreatment, and partner violence. As human trafficking does not occur in isolation from these other forms of violence, an effective community response to human trafficking will involve multidisciplinary collaboration on both prevention and … | community, ht, human trafficking, multidisciplinary, prevention-video, sex trafficking | |
| Direct Services to Survivors of Human Trafficking | Developing policy and protocols about trafficking services is less about expanding existing services to include a new population, and more about building capacity to intentionally serve the needs of survivors of human trafficking. | direct service, ht, human trafficking, policy, protocol, sex trafficking | |
| Educating School Personnel & Students on Minor Sex Trafficking: Overview of the Teach2Reach Program | This session is from NCCASA’s 2021 NC Sexual Violence Primary Prevention Summit: “Pulling Back the Lens: Expanding Out Understanding of Violence Prevention.” It is critical that youth and school personnel receive education and training on domestic minor sex trafficking (DMST), including its definitions and dynamics, resources available to minors, and … | DMST, domestic minor sex trafficking\, human trafficking, interdisciplinary, minors, prevention-summit, sex trafficking, Teach2Reach, trafficking, youth | |
| Effectual Measurement for Courageous Social Change: Findings from a Human Trafficking Prevention Curriculum Matrix | This presentation will explain the process used to create the matrix, present the findings of the survey process, and provide recommendations for the future of human trafficking prevention curriculum development. | ht, human trafficking, human trafficking matrix, matrix, prevention-video | |
| Equipping North Carolina’s Rape Crisis Centers to Serve Survivors of Human Trafficking Webinar | This 90-minute webinar will cover basics of services to survivors of human trafficking in the context of local rape crisis centers. While introductory material will be briefly covered, this webinar is not a Human Trafficking 101 and presumes basic knowledge of definitions and common forms of human trafficking as well … | expanding our reach, ht, human trafficking, rape crisis center, rcc, services, training, webinar | |
| Essential Knowledge for Addressing CSEC in NC Rollout | In this 60 minute webinar we launch a three-part online training program in collaboration with Justice U: Essential Knowledge of Addressing the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in North Carolina: Equipping Critical Roles and Professions with Skills to Prevent and Address CSEC. The intended audience is any North Carolina professional … | child sex trafficking, commercial sexual exploitation of children, csec, justiceu, sex trafficking | |
| Expanding Our Reach: Equipping NC’s RCCs to Serve Survivors of Human Trafficking | Welcome to Expanding Our Reach: Equipping North Carolina’s Rape Crisis Centers to Serve Survivors of Human Trafficking. This manual brings NCCASA’s decades of expertise and advocacy in the fields of sexual violence and human trafficking together with Crossroads’ strong human trafficking direct services program for in-depth guidance on incorporating services … | direct service, expanding our reach, ht, human trafficking, manual, programs, rape crisis center, rcc, services | |
| Expanding Our Reach: Human Trafficking Policy and Protocol Webinar | Sometimes survivors of human trafficking are considered specialized populations that programs reluctantly engage. Concerns about safety and capacity are common challenges. This webinar will address some of these concerns by looking at policies and procedures that build capacity to better serve the needs of survivors of human trafficking. We will … | confidentiality, emergency response, ethics, expanding our reach, ht, human trafficking, media, outreach, policy, protocol, webinar | |
| Getting Our Message Out: Workshop for Effective Human Trafficking Awareness | Accurate awareness is essential for an effective Human Trafficking program, especially as false narratives and misinformation continue to challenge programming. The goal of awareness is to make the public aware of the existence, nature, and scope of the problem. When we understand the scope of the problem, we know where … | awareness, awareness messaging, community education, ht, human trafficking, misinformation, outreach | |
| Guiding Principles for Agencies Serving Survivors of Human Trafficking in the Regional Southeastern US | A new resource is available for agencies serving survivors of human trafficking in the regional southeastern United States. The Guiding Principles for Agencies Serving Survivors of Human Trafficking Visit disclaimer page was published by the Catholic Charities of Louisville’s Bakhita Empowerment Initiative and developed in collaboration with all the members … | direct service, guide, ht, human trafficking, sex trafficking, toolkit | |
| How to Choose a Human Trafficking Curriculum | In 2015, Session Law 2015-279 was passed by the NC General Legislature, mandating the inclusion of sex trafficking prevention education in reproductive health education in NC schools. However, human trafficking prevention curriculum vary widely in their quality, evidence base, topics, and approach. In this 90-minute training, attendees will learn how … | curriculum, evaluate, evaluation, ht, human trafficking, prevention-video, sex trafficking, youth | |
| Human Trafficking Prevention 101: Avoiding Common Traps | As violence preventionists, we are careful to make sure that we don’t cause harm while we are trying to prevent harm. In this 90-minute virtual training, attendees will learn how to avoid common missteps in violence prevention strategies and messaging. | harm reduction, ht, human trafficking, messaging, prevent harm, preventionist, sex trafficking, violence prevention | |
| Human Trafficking Prevention Curriculum Matrix | The purpose of this toolkit is to assist North Carolina school districts in identifying a human trafficking prevention curriculum that best fits the needs and goals of their local school district. | curriculum, ht, human trafficking, school districts, toolkit | |
| Human Trafficking Prevention Infographic | human trafficking, infographic, prevention, social ecological model | ||
| Human Trafficking Risk and Protective Factors | In the media and common dialogue, people often talk about risk factors casually, based on beliefs and anecdotal information. In the field of public health, however, peer-reviewed research continues to identify known risk and protective factors and best practices for talking about safety in violence prevention. Sometimes this research confirms … | ht, human trafficking, prevention-video, protective factors, risk and protective factors, risk factors, violence prevention | |
| Human Trafficking, Chattel Slavery, and Structural Racism: What Journalists Need to Know | In many parts of the world today, human trafficking is referred to as “modern-day slavery,” and indeed, various forms of slavery have existed throughout history. In the historical context of the U.S., however, most people associate “slavery” with one specific model: chattel slavery. In this essay, adapted from our Human … | chattel slavery, ht, human trafficking, racial justice, racism, sex trafficking, slavery, structural racism, trafficking | |
| Multidisciplinary Collaborative Model for Anti-Human Trafficking Task Forces Development & Operations Roadmap | Roadmap purpose: 0 To provide task forces with a tool to identify needs and gaps in processes, collaboration, growth, performance, and progress toward requirements of grant funding (if applicable). 0 To reinforce that development as a multidisciplinary task force is a process that requires time, attention, and intention. 0 To … | capacity building, collaboration, evaluation, grant funding, ht, human trafficking, multidisciplinary, roadmap, task force | |
| NCCASA Human Trafficking Prevention Infographic | PDF document outlining NCCASA’s overall approach to human trafficking prevention. | ht, human trafficking, infographic, prevention | |
| NCCASA Human Trafficking Prevention Toolkit | Human trafficking prevention has at times been framed primarily as a criminal justice priority or been siloed from other forms of violence prevention. As experts in sexual violence prevention, NCCASA recognizes sex trafficking as a form of sexual violence and the connection of sexual violence to all forms of human … | framework, harm reduction lens, ht, human trafficking, prevention, public health, sex trafficking, strategies, toolkit, trafficking, upstream prevention, violence prevention | |
| NCCASA Statement on Chrystul Kizer | Chrystul is a victim of domestic minor sex trafficking (DMST). Any time a minor is involved in the sex trade, they are a victim of DMST. There is no such thing as a “child prostitute,” and Chrystul Kizer was the victim of Randall Volar, who was trafficking her for his … | blog, blog post, DMST, domestic minor sex trafficking\, ht, human trafficking, sex trafficking, statement | |
| Project No Rest – Common Threads Videos | The survivor stories in the video “Common Threads” illustrate some of the vulnerabilities experienced by people that traffickers seek to exploit. Howard was homeless, Cindy felt alone and out of place, Jorge’s daughter needed medicine and Kerri was having problems at home. Situations such as these could happen to anyone. … | exploitation, ht, human trafficking, sex trafficking, trafficking, vulnerabilities | |
| Recommendations for Educating Youth about Sex Trafficking | The need to educate youth on sex trafficking in the United States has received considerable attention; however, limited research is available to guide development of educational programming for youth. Perspectives from 32 experts in fields connected to sex trafficking and violence prevention were obtained through focus groups and interviews. Questions … | curriculum, education, ht, human trafficking, recommendations, research, sex trafficking, trafficking, youth | |
| Risk Factors for Experiencing Sex Trafficking – Teach2Reach | community, ht, human trafficking, protective factors, risk and protective factors, risk factors, sex trafficking, social ecological model | ||
| Seek, Engage and Empower North Carolina (SEE NC) | The Council for Women & Youth Involvement’s (CFWYI) response to human trafficking is spearheaded by the Seek, Engage and Empower North Carolina (SEE NC) project. CFWYI uses a community-based approach that focuses on building partnerships with the agencies and individuals working at the local level to support and advocate for … | community collaboration, ht, human trafficking, marginalization, sex trafficking, trafficking | |
| Serving Human Trafficking Minors | This webinar builds on a general understanding of human trafficking and trauma-informed service delivery. This training will 1) equip rape crisis centers and other direct service agencies with skills and strategies to identify and respond to minor victims of human trafficking, 2) provide practical tips for separating youth from traffickers … | direct service, ht, human trafficking, legislative policy, minors, policy, trauma, trauma-informed care, youth | |
| Working with LGBTQ+ Survivors of Human Trafficking | The language you use matters. NCCASA can support member agencies in creating safer spaces that respect the gender identity and sexual orientation of LGBTQ+ survivors of human trafficking. | gender, housing, ht, human trafficking, LGBT, LGBTQIA, sex trafficking, transgender | |
| WRAL This is Human Trafficking Original Series | Original WRAL series featuring NCCASA staff and state partners. | ht, human trafficking, sex trafficking, trafficking |
Additional Resources
- NC Human Trafficking Commission - NCCASA and our member agencies were instrumental in the development of the NCHTC’s Standards of Service for Survivors of Human Trafficking, adopted in 2019
- Additional Project NOREST Resources
- HOME | NCCAHT
- NC DOA : Human Trafficking
- The Irina Project